WORLD’S FASTEST GIRL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1938, Page 8

WORLD’S FASTEST GIRL

AIR HOSTESS ON DUTCH LINER. PEOPLE TELL THEIR SECRETS. You’d hardly guess that Wilhelmina Keiser is one of the fastest girls in the world! But she is, for every day of the week she manages to have breakfast in Amsterdam, drop in to London for lunch, and be back again in Holland for tea! She’s an air hostess aboard one of the Dutch K.L.M. liners, and her job is to make timid passengers courageous, fussy ones comfy, and big-business men less bored than usual.

One glance at Wilhelmina in her trim blue jacket and white shirt-blouse is usually sufficient to bring a smile to the face of the most worried traveller. For’ this charming Dutch girl is, to say the least of it, ‘'easy to look at.” Before she took up her job as an air hostess, Wilhelmnia was a teacher in a .school in Holland. She speaks five languages fluently, and has a smattering of several others. She still finds flying “very thrilling' - —perhaps because, before becoming an she had never once been up in an aeroplane.

Most, of the hostesses employed on the Dutch air liners are said to resign after six months in order to be married. They get as many as 90 proposals of marriage every year.

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Wilhelmina told an interviewer with a quiet smile. “But I must be different, for, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never had one proposal. ...” Air travellers,, the “fastest girl” has discovered, are infinitely more talkative than ground ones. And most of them want to tell their innermosr secrets to the smiling hostess. Big international financiers give her “tips” about the markets; famous stage and film stars confide their plans and their hopes to her, and even diplomats seem to want to talk about their lives to Wilhelmina.